Green roof gardens and terraces provide insulation to the interior spaces of the building while minimizing the "urban heat island" effect so prevalent in Manhattan. They also reduce the flow of storm water runoff and pollutants into city sewers.
The East Village is a New York City neighborhood with a complicated vibe. It's a place where restaurant equipment wholesalers and ancient brick walk-ups rub shoulders with spanking new condo towers and hip hotels with signature martinis. Almost everywhere there are also traces of the hippie-Boho culture that settled in before the 1960s and does what it can to keep its flag flying.
It's difficult to insert a new building into those streets and get it to speak to so many different contexts. The ideal combination of grit and elegance, muscle and intellect is hard to arrive at, and over the last four or five years some local projects by name architects have gotten it wrong. But Cooper Union's new academic building, which opened this fall, is a genuine triumph, a canny exercise in architectural multilingualism.
[I]ts futuristic façade is strikingly different in style and unlike anything else around it. The East Village is an area in transition, best known for its disappearing Bowery flophouses and restaurant supply stores. The wave of development moving along the Bowery in the wake of Sanaa's New Museum with its offhand infusion of sophisticated Japanese design already contains the marks of Meatpacking-District gentrification. With its uneven mix of scales and textures and juxtapositions that have more to do with unpredictable change than reliable constants, this is a place that upends any conventional or stable idea of "contextual" harmony.
It is not surprising that the school would commission an equally advanced design for its new construction, not only for the latest in technology and sustainability, but also as an appropriate learning environment for those engaged in creative disciplines. Applying a tough sensibility to a tough assignment revitalized an amorphous status quo. To this native New Yorker who has watched the city evolve over decades and treasures its unrelenting diversity, Mr. Mayne has got it just right.
The stair is meant to be the interactive heart of the building and it appears to be working, although reality doesn't always follow architects' plans. Students move between classes, sit on the steps with their computers or lunches, and peel off to adjacent study lounges. Daylight pours down from a skylight at the top. This is high architectural drama, a luminous and exhilarating invitation into the structure's life and use. It is not building as bling. It is how architecture turns program and purpose into art. And it perfectly expresses the creative energy of New York.
Miller used dimensional type to engage and activate multiple planes and architectural surfaces. The building identity, for example, is optically extruded letterforms that appear "correct" when seen in strict elevation, but distort as the profile of the letter is dragged backwards in space. The top half of the letters, appearing on one plane of the canopy, are dimensional, while the bottom half are cut out of another plane, echoing the transparency of the building's skin of perforated stainless steel.
TIME: So Cooper Union comes to you and says "Okay, here's the program. We need laboratories, offices, classrooms." They told you what they wanted. What did you want to bring to this project?
MAYNE: I don't bring anything a priori to a project in a conscious way. I don't come with an agenda. Clearly I come with interests that I've pursued over 35 years. Who I am as an architect and the history of my work — that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.
And I really couldn't with this one because it had a very complicated program. There was nothing to design until I knew how big it was and how many pieces there were. The envelope was given us — the basic shape — because it's a zoning diagram. And we needed every ounce of it because we didn't have enough. And then we looked at the program. On one side are laboratories and they go straight up and they're very efficient and straightforward. And in the front where the offices are, ditto. There's not a lot of room there for architecture.
